KOCHI: Congress MP Shashi Tharoor on Thursday urged for a review into the state of Kerala for revising the legislation to remove outdated laws that stop the establishment of businesses in Kerala citing the number of unemployed youths in the state. He also mentioned the number of youngsters who are shifting to abroad for better opportunities and the investor suicides in Kerala. He also proposed a change in the university curriculum for more job creation.
Pioneering Growth: Transforming Kerala, a conference which was organised by the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) and the Kerala State Industrial Development Corporation in Kochi was attended by the Congress MP where he made those remarks. Tharoor also took a dig at the ruling Left government, saying the hartals in Kerala have come down because “the principal perpetrators are in power.”
“Young people are leaving the state and wishing to leave the state. About 33 per cent of the youngsters wish to go abroad for higher studies as there are no suitable jobs for them,” he said.
According to Tharoor, there are around two lakh technical and professional job seekers registered in Kerala’s employment exchange.
“Around half of them are diploma holders, and 44,000 are engineering graduates.
The All India Professional Congress conducted a survey and found that there are around 60,000 unemployed engineering graduates and 66 per cent of them were in jobs that do not require an engineering degree,” he said, adding that this mismatch reflects the fundamental problem in our education system. “The skills being imparted through our education are not aligned to the skills in demand. The skills that are required in the market are not available. When other states face a shortage in the number of doctors, unfortunately, we have 6,000 doctors registered in the employment exchange,” added Tharoor.
While he also spoke about the strengths of the state by saying: “Youth, young men and women under the age of 25, constitute more than 23 per cent of the population in the state, which is not very much, In India as a whole, the figure is 50.1 per cent. Kerala is undoubtedly ageing, and even with these astonishingly low figures, our youth unemployment rate is 40 per cent. The saddest part is that most unemployed youth are skilled and educated. In fact, that is something that is very shameful,” Tharoor said.
